Erebus wrote on Mar 16, 2011, 16:16:While it's amusing to see the publishers running scared over this issue and un-banning left and right, as fas as I'm concerned one of the biggest problems with internet gaming is people feeling they can act like a horse's ass with no repercussions.

Name one "real life" business where you can stand in the middle of the store, act like a jackass, criticize and run down the establishment and its employees, and literally cause damage to the business with no repercussions. With the exception of a WWE wrestlish match or the Republican National Convention, I can't think of too many.

Ban 'em all and let God sort 'em out.

Impressive.

Even after so many have clearly illustrated how the last guy to post this is a total idiot - there you are to pile on with your support.

You actually believe it is a good idea to let a company revoke someone's rights (in this case a game they paid money for) simply because they "criticize and run down the establishment and its employees"?

So, if I don't like a game, and say so, the company should be able to prevent me from playing it? Even though I paid for it?

What if I give it a bad rating on a user review site? Or a mediocre one? Or just fail support it with every fiber of my being?

For crissake, go buy 1984 and have someone read it to you, then explain why you're being a total git.

nin wrote on Mar 16, 2011, 10:32:The first game felt like the right length. The breadcrumbs from the story were spread well enough that, other than the Killer Croc level, I was never thinking "this is getting boring".

That matches my experience, exactly.

Here's hoping they expand on the success of the last one.

This will be one of the few games I'll be torn between the PC and PS3 on...I played the last one on the PC, and it was a very solid port.

PropheT wrote on Mar 15, 2011, 16:22:If this is embarrassing for Bioware I see it as being more embarrassing for the gaming community as a whole. The gaming community sucks. It's petty, it has an overinflated sense of entitlement and ego, and everybody is so willing to jump on The Man for any perceived slight that there's no winning once the mob's hive mind has taken up arms against something. If anything, all this really serves to do is illustrate how completely and totally useless the user review scores are.

No winning?

Look, all they had to do was expand on the success of DAO. It was a no-brainer.

But some bean-counter marketing wonk at EA decided that they could just cash in - sure, they're alienate the current fans of the franchise, but most of them are likely to buy it, anyway, based on the name - meanwhile they expand their player base.

Which, in itself, wouldn't have been well-received...but they chose to do this to the self-proclaimed "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate"!

They made a choice to invoke Bioware's reputation as a maker of epic PC RPGs, and they made a choice to intentionally abuse that reputation with this sequel in order to - and let's be perfectly clear on this - try to sell 4,000,000 copies instead of a mere 3,500,000.

They took a rep that Bioware had cultivated since 1995 and just milked it for a bit more bling.

This is why there's all the "nerd rage" people.

Maybe it doesn't matter to a lot of people - but most people, if they were objective, can see how all of the BS surrounding this game is really sort of shameful.

But hey, if you're okay with them trading on the whole "Baldur's Gate/PC game maker" image that they'd spent the last 15 years cultivating for more console sales, installing DRM while promising NOT to install any DRM, the professional and user reviews all appearing just a BIT too squirrelly to be totally above board...if all of that, combined, doesn't smack the least bit of distasteful to you, then give 'em your money.

eRe4s3r wrote on Mar 15, 2011, 16:10:The problem is that in between those boss fights you face scripted waves of bandits jumping from roofs, spawning behind, inside, above, and below you. With more HP and DPS than your fully specced warrior. Difficulty should NEVER be increased by adjusting DAMAGE AND HP. Difficulty should only ever impact behavior, additional difficulty (friendly fire, fatigue, no auto regeneration etc) and AI to drink potions and heal themselves and use spells more "tactical" ie trying to stun or deadlock your mages, and your healer particularly.

I won't deny that the combat looks very flashy, but when its not against a boss its either a walk in the park (easy,normal) or completely broken (hard,nightmare).

Agreed. This is why I never bothered replaying Mass Effect at higher difficulty.

I mean, you'd never hear the end of it if the game, on higher difficulties, just made your weapons less powerful - but cranking up the armor and HP (in effect, the exact same thing as weapon nerfing) seems to be totally acceptable.

This applies to all games that do this, of course, not just Bioware. It's lazy.

I get that this expansion is too short to get to 20, but why not just leave the cap at 20? So what if you can't get there?

As it is, you hit 10 about 2/3rds of the way there.

Also, though I very rarely pre-order, this kind of reinforced that I never should - the pre-order bonus items for my Space Marine captain made him utterly unkillable. While I lack the willpower not to equip them (c'mon...they're purple! I've been trained like a mouse in a skinner box to equip gear with purple title bars!) they sort of took a lot of the game down a notch.

All I had to do was send in ol' Captain Amazing, then set up my other troops to take out vehicles, hardpoints, and bosses (the pre-order gear doesn't do a ton of DPS, so the fire-team thing sped things up).

Indeed. A company consists of employees - so any time the company does something dumb, it is done by an employee.

Not that I disagree with Beamer's point entirely - EA/Bioware could have disavowed said employee, rather than embracing his actions.

They may not have directed the employee to do what he did, but rather than condemning it, they've endorsed it.

EDIT: And as for the negative Metacritic reviews - I've poked around a bit, myself. I'd say for every suspicious 0 review, here's an equally suspicious 10...only three reviews, a cut-and-pasted 10 for PC, PS3, and 360. Even if you call it a wash, the negatives outnumber the positives by 4-to-1 (and that's not taking into consideration that, in the gaming world, a 7 is an "average" score on a 10 point scale...)

Verno wrote on Mar 15, 2011, 10:53:Why am I not surprised? So much for Laidlaw claiming they were just reading reviews and trying to sift through legitimate criticism. This whole game should be a lesson of what happens when marketing and business trump creative efforts.

Sadly, the lesson will be that it generates controversy, and as stated in the "EA <3s Fox News" story, EA considers controversy to be free advertising.

The only thing about this Metacritic stuff that shocks me is how hamfisted they appear to have gone about it. Same with the AAA review sites - it's as if they didn't merely exert their influence, as many big publishers do...it's as if they gave them a press package and told them not to deviate from the script.

I would have expected shills...Hell, I'm not sure I trust half of you people ...but attributable employees? That just seems...gah.

entr0py wrote on Mar 14, 2011, 14:10:Virtually every Windows program leaves behind folders and registry entries when uninstalled. If that's all it is, it's nothing unusual. Still it's a minor irritation that software developers can't be asked to clean up after themselves, but that's why we have things like registry cleaners and revo uninstaller.

Methinks you may have missed some trivial details, such as EA being under a court order to disclose any use of SecuROM. They did the opposite, in this case - stating vehemently that they were NOT using SecuROM.

Of course, according to EA, they didn't. They used something else, that just happens to leave files behind that are named (and behave) exactly like SecuROM.

Verno wrote on Mar 14, 2011, 12:05:They were smart about its release date if nothing else, its up against nothing right now. That being said its metacritic rating is quite low for a big budget title and that could potentially hurt its sales. The word of the mouth on the game isn't wonderful either. Unfortunately marketing is very effective with the casual/console crowd.

Its almost insulting that they tried to pass off a lesser sequel for a larger price tag.

Actually a few more than that but those are the big ones. If you only spend your time working on a single city then it better be interesting. High Town, Low Town, Dark Town? Is this game aimed at 12 year olds who need wealth disparity explicitly spelled out for them? The much hyped ten year plot mainly consists of retreading Kirkwall doing Fedex quests. The plot itself lacks any punch or attachment for the player. Hawke is just generic enough to be slightly boring but not enough that I could insert myself into the role, I think perhaps the dialogue wheels limited options came into play here.

It's a very frustrating game because any time you think they are taking a step forward with the design its actually not just two but three steps back somewhere else. The repeated levels are unforgivably lazy design and whats worse is that the lead developer tried to pass this off as no big deal in an interview. You can't make a sequel that is less of everything unless its somehow a better game for it, this game definitely is not.

Well said, Verno.

Teddy wrote:That DA2 is a different style game than DA:O doesn't make the game that it is any worse simply because you enjoyed the original more.

Yeah, actually...it does. A mediocre stand-alone game can be viewed on its own limited merits, but a mediocre sequel is viewed in the light of its predecessor.

Episodes I - III were mediocre movies, but as sequels to the Star Wars Trilogy, they were truly awful.

For a sequel, the bar is set by what came before. The sequel picks up from there - that is the new high water mark. If they don't want to be judged in terms of DAO, then they shouldn't have used the name "Dragon Age".

Teddy, you and a few others are defending the game - I get that, you're allowed to like it. I've defended games that no one else seems to think are worth a damn. But what you CAN'T do is tell people that they're wrong to hate DA2 so much, or not to compare it to DAO.

Teddy wrote on Mar 13, 2011, 18:25:It's also well known in the industry that gamers behave like children who will post metacritic reviews having never played the game. Better still are the idiots who post reviews that they LOVE the game top to bottom and give it a 1 because they can't figure out the website.

Regardless of what the whiners say, the game is good. It's not as good as the original in my opinion, but that doesn't automatically make it a 2/10 game. That's the true idiocy of gamers today, if it doesn't live up to what THEY expected from the game, all of a sudden it's the worst game of all time. If they'd had no expectation and it was a new IP that they tried, they'd give it a 7 or 8 instead.

Pure idiocy. A game sequel isn't scored according to how much you liked the original more, or what you were expecting from it. It's scored based on what it is. That's what gamers never seem to grasp about reviews and that's why official review scores typically vary so much from anonymous gamer review scores, particularly when involving a sequel.

It's pure idiocy to think that players aren't going to look at a sequel in comparison to the original.

While DA2 might have been a decent action game, it's the sequel to a well-liked RPG. The people who are trashing it in their ratings are rating it as a sequel to DAO.

The simple fact is the Bioware/EA decided to cash in for the quick money and broad demographic, just like they did with ME2 - but what those wonks don't realize is, they're doing irreparable harm to Bioware's reputation.

Sure, they can make big money in the short term, but they've cooked the goose that was laying the golden eggs. The asshats responsible don't care, though - they can probably live in style for the rest of their lives, and let the IPs what we all enjoyed wither and die.

I liked it better when gaming wasn't "mainstream"...It's gotten way too Hollywood.